Baking, a Love Story

Pumpkin Pancakes—A Great Excuse to Eat Dessert First

Breakfast is the best meal of the day as far as I am concerned. For a sweet toothed baker like myself it is an excuse to rightfully eat dessert as a meal. Pumpkin pancakes are no exception.

These fluffy pancakes are packed with the good for you vitamins that pumpkins are famous for, but taste like soft and tender tiny spice cakes lightly sweetened with brown sugar and perked up with nutmeg and cinnamon. I even teamed it up with a creamy maple cream cheese topping (breakfast talk for FROSTING!). Doesn’t that spell dessert for breakfast to you?

These pumpkin pancakes are totally memorable if you want to wow the socks of some guests coming for brunch. Although barefoot brunch goers might be a bit uncouth, unless you live in L.A. like I do where flip flops are haute couture.

I hope you take this pumpkin pancake recipe as an excuse to invite some friends over for Sunday Brunch and enjoy eating dessert as your first and most important meal of the day!

For the pancakes: In a large mixing bowl, whisk together dry ingredients (flour through salt).

Now is the time to grease your pan so it gets nice and hot. Put a pat of butter and tablespoon of canola oil on your frying pan or griddle. Turn your stove onto medium. Use a paper towel to move around the butter and oil so it greases the whole pan.

In a separate mixing bowl, combine milks, brown sugar, canola oil, vanilla and eggs. Beat together so it is well combined. Now add 1/2 of the mixture to the dry ingredients and whisk gently. Then add the rest and whisk until just combined. If your batter is too thick to drop onto griddle, then add just 1 more tablespoon of milk. Over mixing your pancake batter will make it tough. A few lumps in your batter is ok but ingredients should be combined.

To test your griddle for readiness…drop a little water onto the pan. If it sizzles, you are ready to go. Make sure your stove is set to a medium temperature. Too high and they’ll burn…too low and they won’t cook through.

Ladle pancake batter on to pan. Flip pancake only when you see a few bubbles on the uncooked side, or use your spatula to take a little peak at the cooked side. You want them to be a nice golden brown. You may want to cook half of the batter as is and then add 1/4 c. of chocolate chips and a 1/4 c. of toasted pecans for the last half.

Maple Cream Cheese Dipping Sauce: In a mixing bowl of a stand mixer or use hand beaters, beat together cream cheese, butter, maple syrup and sifted powdered sugar. Beat on medium to high so that it is smooth and creamy. Add a tablespoon of milk if you need to thin it out. Serve it on the side, sprinkled with a pinch of nutmeg and chopped toasted pecans on top for garnish.

37 thoughts on “Pumpkin Pancakes—A Great Excuse to Eat Dessert First”

I’m loooving these pumpkin recipes floating around…finally starting to feel like fall! I’m not a huge breakfast person, but these pancakes are right up my alley. Oh, and that maple cream cheese topping….sounds heavenly!!

Yo’ve outdone yourself with these, Geni. They sound incredible and love that you included frosting .., er … a dipping sauce. I can’t speak for others but that’s just what my breakfasts have been missing. 😉

Feeling inspired to try out new ways of dealing with pumkin. Being from Norway its not that common to use it for anything but soup. LOVE the taste, so now I have pancakes and lasagna recipes to be tested. Cant wait to try! Thanks for the inspiration!
/Louisa

Oh goodness. These pancakes look so delicious! Wish I can wake up at your house for breakfast someday…..okay, sorry if that sounds creepy. I guess I just want desserts for breakfast so badly, especially with these beautiful pumpkin pancakes! 😛

Hehe I love any excuse for dessert for breakfast. I do the same thing 😉 I even apply it to cookies with oatmeal 😀 And pumpkin is a super food, so it’s a great food to start the day with! These pumpkins look delish!

Now this is definitely going to be made this weekend! Just who will I invite over?? I better make some friends soon here :). This is fabulous Geni and your photos make these look so tempting! I will splurge for these as I’ve got all day to burn it off and I know it will be so worth it

So i made these yesterday and they are PHENOMENAL! I didn’t have any cream cheese so I had them with just maple syrup but they were amazing nonetheless! I’ve taken pictures so they’ll be up on my blog soon 🙂